On Silence

by Deborah Margolin
for Agnes Borinsky

All’s Well that Ends Well

The woman is in the bathroom with her two children, Matt and Julia. All three in one smelly bathroom, the pink ‘50s tile, the tattered bath mat, the sink splattered with toothpaste droppings, the toilet exhausted from its sad receipts, the towels drooping like eyelids, oblique and damp. Two kids and a Mother in a bathroom. Enough for a painting. 

The girl is six, and she’s beautiful in that drowsy, preconscious way. Her lips are puffy, full of deep pink flesh, her eyes tight in her head as if in taut collusion with her mind and thoughts, her little feet exuberant with the floor. 

The boy is eight and a half; his beauty is more obvious and easier to ignore, his hair is too long, his eyelashes are endless and curl up towards his forehead like those of a torch singer in an evening gown. He is very much the poet, out of step with the practical universe, richly attuned to invisible things. His sister torments him much of the time with the practicalities which elude him. She understands how to hurt anybody. She understands that people are hurt by different things.

The little girl has just realized that she’s going to die someday. Just realized this fully, for some reason, some unknowable reason. There’s always just a moment in a young life when this dawns fully on a person, a person for whom death is generally very far away, but it dawns fully, like the a soldier waking for his first day, a gun on his back, in a foreign country where he’s been sent to fight a war. She’s just realized she’s going to die someday, here in this bathroom.

Everything is quiet for a few moments. Then she starts crying. She’s yelling; this isn’t a peaceful sorrow, not even a sorrow of any kind, really. It’s an outrage, an insult. Like being called a dirty Jew. She’s outraged. Her brother picks at a piece of soap stuck on the side of the tub. Mother is peeing.

I am not going to! she says.

Mother’s pee sounds musical, jaunty, as it falls. They talk over this tinkling fountain.

I’m sorry, Julia, you are, her brother says. The piece of soap comes off under his fingernail. He tries to flick it into the sink. His sorrow rises with his eyelashes up over his head.

I’m not! I’m not going to die! And my brother’s not going to die EITHER! she shrieks.

The Mother looks at them. She’s wiping herself, getting ready to stand up and flush. She tries an academic approach:

Everything dies, and when things die, they ready the earth for more life. It’s a cycle, like in The Lion King, the great circle of life, remember?

My brother isn’t going to die! I’m not going to do it! There isn’t any circle! I’m not going to die, why do I have to do that! You can’t make me do that, and I’m not going to!

Mother flushes the toilet.

Okay, Mother says, okay, that’s fine. You don’t have to do it.

What happens when you die, Mom, the boy asks, returning to his soap piece on the edge of the tub. Do you just see darkness, and lie there very still?

No, the Mother says. You don’t see darkness.

What then, he asks. 

Well, you just don’t see. It’s another way of being.

The girl has stopped crying and her eyes are ablaze. She’s seen a piece of candy on the floor that she dropped there earlier, when she snuck into the bathroom to eat it secretly. Defiantly, looking her mother directly in the eye, she pops it into her mouth.

Mmmmmmm, she says, This candy is duh-LICIOUS!

She swallows the candy, and then her eyes fill with tears again.

I can’t do it, Mom, I won’t.

Fine, the Mother says, don’t ever do it.

There’s a silence. 

Mother opens the bathroom door, and sound from the house flows in like dammed water loosed.

Ma! Ma! The little girl says. Can you talk when you’re dead?

No. You can’t talk! says the brother, sadly.

The Mother turns to the little girl, lifts her. 

I don’t know, the Mother says.

But can you talk, can you talk? Is there any talking?

We can’t hear the dead people talking, but that doesn’t mean they don’t talk, the Mother says.

The girl struggles down the Mother’s body, stands on her own. Says:

Well that means there’s talking, and I’ll just talk. If I can be dead and still talk I don’t care that I’m dead. I’ll talk and talk and talk and be dead and talk.

The girl bursts out of the bathroom, relieved. Goes into her bedroom, pulls the head off one of her Barbie dolls. She throws it up in the air. It hits the ceiling, falls down dully, rolls an instant and stops, nose down. The little girl puts the headless Barbie fully upright and says: 

I’m dead, and now I’d like to tell you a story! Are you listening, boys and girls? Are you listening? Listen, you stupid, stupid children! You have to listen!

I’ll Be Seeing You

I’ll be seeing you: “… this colloquial formula does not necessarily imply a future meeting.” —American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms

There were two occasions on which I said goodbye to myself in the mirror.

The first time, I had just taken a shower after learning that I was pregnant with Matt. I came out of the shower, dried my body, stepped out of the bathroom and stood naked before a full-length mirror on the closet door. I saw my shapely body and loved it savagely, tenderly and newly. I wished it bon voyage. I entered into a contract with myself. I had no idea if I would ever see myself in that body again, and I felt an unfettered and joyful fear.

The second time occurred in front of a dressing room mirror in Toronto, Canada. I had just finished performing and come offstage. It is that delirious moment between moments, right after performance; a private moment between public moments; a delicate transition, when one is halfway between a character and a self, like being on a train between towns, having no idea what town is just outside, there are trees and birds, and beautiful as they may be, no train stops near them; they are part of passage, they are like dreams. 

I stood in front of the mirror. It was four days before I was due to start a grueling regimen of chemotherapy. 

I had been told I would lose most of my hair. I had been told they might have to cut into my neck to put in a system for delivery of these chemicals. I had been told I’d be nauseous, constipated, and pale. I had been told one chemical scars the lungs, the other can damage the heart. I had been told all these things, and I stood in antecedence of them, looking flushed and beautiful, much as I’d looked four weeks into a pregnancy. I stood in joy for a long time. Then, out loud, I said to that beautiful girl:

I’ll be seeing you.

Keep Body and Soul Together

My beloved friend L and I got sick around the same time. Rather, she started it; standing at the Xerox machine with galleys of a book of my work which she’d edited and muscled into publication, she was told on the phone that she had a small breast tumor, operable, with radiation to follow.  She continued xeroxing, and called me while doing so to tell me this news. 

L was a brilliant scholar of Theater and Gender Theory, a full professor at an Ivy League university, who spoke softly with a southern drawl, and had luminous ideas which, even when seen in the stillness of print, seemed impulsive and passionate, as if they were physically moving through the mind in a terpsichorean parade. We met when, as a theater scholar, she was writing about my feminist theater company; our friendship branched off from this academic context and into something undefinable and very, very deep. L was a melancholic, a philosopher, a sexual sadomasochist, a poet and a Buddhist.  She associated ideas and bodies in ways that were at once wildly radical and profoundly humanist. She described herself as “Southern white trash” and made me laugh unmercifully with her stories about her mother, broke and insane, who made her and her brother participate in “luaus” in their broken-down driveway, where they would feign roasting a pig while loud hula music played and her brother was forced to dress up in a white sheet and pretend he was Moses.

Masses were discovered in my nasopharynx and neck, and my long tangle with lymphoma began. 

L, a devout Buddhist, wanted me to go to death and dying workshops (Buddhist thought is about rehearsing various kinds of impermanence, I think), but I demurred, telling her I wanted to go to life and living workshops. 

I remember her coming with me to a doctor’s appointment during which I was told about several lesions (the word lesion being a horrifying new term for me, and one which still fills me with terror) and L trying to get me to lift my head, to eat a bowl of soup. 

All our friends were going through midlife crises, but L and I, fighting for our lives, found this funny. Other women, worried about cellulite, made us grateful our cellulitic legs could even get us up the stairs! During this period our friendship deepened even further. We called ourselves The Cancer Girls. We discussed sex and philosophy; we discussed love and money; we discussed mortality and its relationship to language. As both L and I were in love with language, we discussed alternatives to it, should disease or aphasia rob either of us of our ability to use it in service of our great love for each other.  I told her that, should she be unable to speak, she should send me an envelope with confetti in it, and when I opened the envelope and the confetti showered down, I would understand, and would come to her and rescue her from solitude with tools of hyperarticulate silence.

Right before her ambulatory breast surgery, I was allowed to sit with L in the holding room, where she, dressed in a blue hospital gown with paper slippers and a blue hair cover, gave me the information that she told me would obviate absolutely and forever my need to go to graduate school in Performance Studies. She told me all I needed to know was that Jacques Lacan, the famous philosopher of language cum psychologist had said two immutable, critically important things:

1)    The signifier is always literal in the unconscious (i.e., whatever you say, you really mean, even if you’re using an idiom or a figure of speech); and secondly, and most critical, most ineffable, most profound, most tragic:

2)    To speak is to suffer.

This last, with all its layers of meaning, has informed my entire life and work. 

It turned out that my beloved had a rare and deadly new form of breast cancer, which literally spreads the way fire does, grabbing and converting everything it touches into part of itself. The effortless metastasis of this disease reminded me of the celerity and beauty of L’s mind and intellect. She began coughing uncontrollably as the disease melted through her chest wall and into her lungs. She cried a lot, and during that period, everything I did annoyed her. I would leave her apartment, sad but undaunted, and try another approach the next day. 

She shaved her head. Her baldness clarified both her beauty and her suffering. It was Springtime then, and L told me she couldn’t go out into the lovely afternoon sunlight, because it made her so sad and angry to be enchanted by a beauty she was soon to be torn from.

Once as we were going to her doctor in those late days, we were walking down the street and L was hurrying and hurrying and gasping for breath. I said to her:

Sweet one, slow down. We are in no rush. Walk more slowly, dear, please!

And I looked at her, her body, her materiality, how frail and skinny yet tangible and visible she was; when she responded verbally, I suddenly saw clearly that her speech and her body were not of the same mettle; that her voice and ideas came from a place that was different from her material body; that her speech was a cartography of her immortal soul, and her body something of a one night stand God had with the world; she was beautiful; I saw that she was dying, and I saw how ridiculous, how incomprehensible, that was. In that instant.

Friends gathered at the hospital; she’d been admitted, and the doctors finally had a terminal patient on whom they were free to try everything. Many of us gathered in the room at once, and L, high from painkillers, grinned from ear to ear and told us how beautiful we all were.

When I got her alone, I asked her to hold on for a month. I told her I had an important play opening that I needed her to see. I think I deluded myself into thinking that she could be distracted from dying, the way I’d distracted my children from things they wanted in the supermarket, things they had fixated on and might have a tantrum over. She said, in her velvet Southern drawl:

Honey, I don’t think I’m gonna make it; honey, bring me the script, I don’t think I’m gonna make it that long.

The next day, when I came with the script, she told me she couldn’t see. She told me she’d dreamt there were seven things on the floor, and she was to pick them up, and when the last thing was picked up, she would die. I joked: Oh well! Just leave them! Don’t bother cleaning up, just leave everything as it is! No cleaning up in here!

The next day, when I went in to her, she asked me again about language. She said: 

Honey, if I can’t speak, will you still be with me? Will you still understand me? 

And I said, Yes, yes, yes, of course, let it go! You can let speech go! Anytime, you can stop when you’re ready, and I’m still with you, I’m right here.

I brought Matt and Julia to see her. They both loved her very much, sensing since they were babies both the power of her gentleness and the hilarity of her rage. Her process of dying had so many things in common with their processes of learning to live. L had always made them laugh, even when she said very little. They both kissed her face many times. We had a flat tire going  home.

On the very last day I heard her speak, she returned her voice to that of the teacher. She told me:

Honey, I have just eaten oatmeal. I loved my oatmeal. It tasted so good. They served it just the way I asked. It had in it brown sugar, and butter, and every bite was Heaven to me. Here I am, honey, here, so small on time, and I loved, loved, my oatmeal. You can do that. You can do that too.

The next time I saw her, she did not speak anymore, but lay still, breathing heavily and sporadically. Her partner brought her home.

On New Year’s Day, I was called by phone and told that she had passed away at the stroke of midnight as the year 2000, after anguish in labor, gave birth to 2001.

When I got to her apartment, there were 10 people outside the door. They told me: Go in and see her. She looks so peaceful. 

I entered the apartment and approached the bed, and my beautiful friend was laid out there, bereft of her soul, just her body, and her face, which was contorted into a mask of homicidal rage. I have no idea what those people saw when they looked at her.

I told the children that L had died, as gently as I could, as neutrally and tenderly as I could. Matt cried for a little while, and then moved on, but Julia started laughing, and she lifted one of her dolls and began to fly it around her room. 

It’s wonderful, she said. Before, she was just in one place, one single only place, and I had to go far away to see her, but now She’s Just Everywhere!

Silence

I imagine the silence around a just fertilized human ovum. The most obnoxious sperm, the one that swam the fastest and spared no other any mercy, brutalizes his way into the egg, and the egg lets out a little cry; then the doors of the egg slam shut. A boundary forms around this astonishing new consortium of sperm and egg; they know themselves to be up to the most atavistic and sacred devilment. This barrier forms the way an invisible bulwark forms around two people who fell in love while you were watching; you saw it happen. And this barrier – called the zona pellucida – is designed to keep out all other sperm; to keep out any other genetic information; to keep out the sounds such things make, the other percussions of the body; and there’s a holy silence, I just know it; a silence worthy of what it precedes: the perilous trip down Fallopia, the arrival at the pelvic pear, blood-lined and sweating; the violent implantation; the waiting. I know that silence. 

The silence of a book. So noisy! Images, people, carriages and cars; sex, murder, text messages and letters; secrets and crimes; loucheness and lyricism! I can hear that silence looking at a book sitting quietly on a table. I have to cover my ears! The din!

The silence of an onion. It’s hard to believe an onion doesn’t cost thousands of dollars: so complete, its brittle skin falling off like a woman’s nightgown, the moist, translucent layers beneath, its pungence, its obliterating sweetness. I do not feel I should be able to afford an onion. 

The silence of the drug addict who stole my purse while I was performing onstage. I didn’t know she had stolen my purse; I didn’t know that everything I had brought with me was gone, but I did know. Her silence told me that. In the bathroom, three scenes until my next appearance onstage. Playing a miserable character whom none of the other characters liked. Had to pee desperately: woman in there, young woman, staring at me, silent; a nasty, incalescent panic in her eyes. I knew she had robbed me before I knew I’d been robbed. Everyone hated my character in that play, and thus though they loved me, they hated me also. People fled when they heard I’d been robbed, as if I could infest them with bad fortune. I was glad; something about being robbed while working for nothing seemed humiliating. I smiled when I was finally alone in the theater, with no one near me, no keys, no money, no way to get home, nothing. 

Walked out into the rain, so far west in midtown Manhattan that it’s not even Manhattan anymore, it’s an anonymous dark alley near a river, where rats take freedoms they have nowhere else and you could be anywhere, it’s dark there even when it’s light. And there, on the scalloped metalwork around what was trying to be a tree, was a $20 bill, draped like a Dali clock, wet with rain, filthy. I picked it up and took a taxi home. I was laughing because that silent woman in the bathroom with the hot, deliquescent eyes: I know her.

Most sublime is the silent body onstage. This silence is like no other. The still, silent body in the light is an outrage, a radical act, a protest, a come-on, a flirtation, a denial, a consummation. When the lights come up and I’m standing onstage, before you, humbled and emboldened by your presence, I am elevated to an apotropaic level: nothing can hurt me, nothing can hurt you, the zona pellucida is around us, we are beginning! I am unstoppable, I belong to you completely. I’m in love with you. I’m being physical with you, I’m letting you hold me, you’re having your way with me, I could die at any moment, we are laughing together, you and I; we are ageless, and I am standing there in silence. 

Deb Margolin is a playwright, actor, and professor of theater. She lives in New Jersey, which she denies. Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance; Kesselring Prize for her play Three Seconds in the Key.